Lisa Bondurant

I spend my time raising kids, gathering eggs, cutting wood, scoping out trees for tapping, making syrup in the last days of winter, watching my garden NOT grow in the summer, writing, wishing that there were more hours on the clock for sleeping.

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Monday, January 25, 2010

A big run and little sap

Rows and rows of big dark cloud...and the rain keeps falling all around.At first it fell in the tiniest of particles, so small, perfectly round atomized fragments of water that could float through the air and land so lightly upon your skin that it felt like the brush of a cold unseen hand. I had looked up from gathering sap, surprised by the cold touch that had not been there the moment before. Woolly sodden clouds drooped down towards me, and I would swear that there had been white puffs and turquoise blue when I had started emptying my sap buckets. But then I had been distracted by the nearly empty buckets, when I had been certain that the sap would run faster today. I guess the trees had felt it coming for the temperature rose soon after the rain had started and the sap that had been running good just hours before, was slowing to a lazy drip. I gathered what there was and headed for the house. Before I had the first pans full of fresh sap the rain was coming down in a steady shower and the temp climbed. By evening the rain was falling hard. By the darkest hours before dawn it seemed to pour down on the tin roof like a river had shifted into the heavens above and it was steamy warm. No sap the falling morning but a river where a creek had been and a plain of brown rapids and white caps where the river had been. The river trail where some of our best sugar maples was flooded, but the temperatures would drop in a few days and another run was due.